Introduced in August 2002 as third generation Radeon. It supports DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0 and was marketed as Visual Processing Unit (VPU).
The R300 was designed by ATi's west cost team and first used in the Radeon 9700 Pro. Although the R300 was also based on the 150nm manufacturing process, the architecture was different compared to it's predecessor. It has an 8 pixel pipeline design with each pipeline having 1 texture mapping unit. Texture combinations (one, two, three dimension with certain types of filtering) are part of the DirectX 9 specification and were made possible on the R300.
Performance-wise the Radeon 9700 Pro managed to beat the GeForce Ti4600 in many scenario's and would really show off when Anti-Aliasing (AA) was used. Driver-wise it took a while for ATi to get things straight, but it worked out eventually for the casual gamer.
A rather unusual card: the Radeon 9500 Pro doesn't show up in the wild too often, let alone this Tyan-build card.
In essence the 9500 Pro is a cut down version of the Radeon 9700. It has less pixel engines and a narrower 128-bit memory bus. > Read more
An engineering sample of Hercules' 3D Prophet 9700 Pro. It's based on the ATi Radeon 9700 Pro chip (R300) that was released on 7 August 2002. This card has a chip from week 32 (5 ~ 9 August) and a PCB date from week 34 (19 ~ 23 August) so it's an early, but finished (development-wise) card. Hercules probably used it for testing and/or validation purposes.
The 9700 Pro is a fully DirectX 9 compliant chip and outperforms the GeForce 4 Ti 4600. nVidia didn't have the GeForce FX ready until early 2003, leaving ATi 'alone' for half a year with the fasted 3D card. Because the GeForce FX isn't such a good performer ATi was facing a bright horizon here. This is the point when the Radeon became really popular!
I haven't removed the heatsinks from the RAM chips to take a look at the brand. However, the BIOS mentions specifically it's a R300 Samsung DDR BIOS P/N 113-94206-101 so I assume it's Samsung branded memory. > Read more
Quite a powerful card back in half 2002! This red beast is based upon ATi's R300 chip which was used in the succesful Radeon 9500 and 9700 series. Those cards were launched in August 2002.
This sample is compareable with the Radeon 9700 Pro. It has a rework on the back and an extra DVI port that can be removed (the little green PCB). Notice that the extra DVI port is upside down. > Read more